The Gift, Ricki and the Flash, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Cop Car, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Dark Places

Ricki and the Flash

The Gift



Shaun the Sheep Movie

Cop Car



Diary of a Teenage Girl

Dark Places






Notes on a good week in film:

The Giver

"The Giver" is not the first - or even the seventh - bad movie Meryl Streep's appeared in, but it is bad, sententious YA sci-fi. In case you hadn't heard: conformity and eugenics, boo; freedom and self-definition, yay.

The East

Regular readers know how I feel about Brit Marling, the talented writer and actress who's made my honorable mention list the last two years with "Another Earth" and "Sound of My Voice."

What Maisie Knew

Sensitive, knowing and true, Scott McGehee's and David Siegel's "What Maisie Knew" takes familiar material involving divorce and child custody to new heights with its intelligence and emotional honesty.

Disconnect

Henry Alex Rubin's "Crash"-meets-the-Internet roundelay "Disconnect" is slick, watchable, and structurally sound for the first hundred minutes but doesn't know how to end in the last fifteen and winds up with little to say. The three primary interlocking storylines involve cyber-bullying, identity theft, and the exploitation of minors on sexually explicit websites.